Flight not form

This past weekend's outdoor wedding was beautiful because the sun shone here in unpredictable Ohio, the temperature hovered around seventy degrees, and the harp stayed relatively (!) in tune.

This is quite possibly the worst harp photo I've ever taken; however, the wedding photographer was my good friend from Comfort Photography and I look forward to seeing all her perfect pictures. This was an especially precious wedding, many years in the making.

At today's annual breakfast gig, S told the group that this was my seventh year playing harp for it. Seventh year. Each time she gives me photos she took of my playing the previous year's event. I am not posting what she gave me today because to me, last year's photos reveal how much I was dreading a frightening surgery scheduled for the next day. I am in such a better place so I (not you) can look at them now, with a healthy kind of dismissal.

I finally met the owner of Tehku Tea House and am excited about our future collaborations. Being involved in a Productive Obsession project guided by Eric Maisel will undoubtedly reveal and perhaps start to disintegrate Those Barriers. I had some big wake-up calls regarding social networking this past week -- it is NOT a trend, but a definitive and immense reality. I'm determined to make the best use of it; I'm still stumbling through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even in finding my true voice for this blog.

I made these cookies again, and attempted baba ganoush (not bad). Future blog posts will probably include more culinary information since food is, and always has been, such an important part of my life. I've gone vegan for a variety of reasons, which wasn't hard to do as I've been vegetarian consuming very little dairy / eggs for the better part of my life. I'm not punk about it, though I follow a lot of punk vegan blogs. In my impressionable past, what I ate was regarded with eagle-eye scrutiny, and residual crap from that has affected what I share about my dietary choices. But cooking / baking is a creative act and therefore earns a right to appear here.

Writing a blog post is exactly what I should not be doing right now; I have projects like arranging and recording a song that a vocalist and I will be performing for an upcoming wedding. But my mind is whirring and maybe if I "write" I will stop eating the remainder of my vegan birthday cake (...too late).

With the passing of the aforementioned birthday and the tax deadline, I am in the same place I always find myself: It's time to really do all those things I said I was going to do. One of them is getting in the Best Shape of My Life. I think I was there once, but it was so long ago. And to get back to that place it occurred to me I'll have to start running.

I really hate running. Or, I think I do... I'm not sure where this came from because when I was younger I was a sprinter and loved it. Someone along the line mentioned I had good form, or no form -- whatever it was, it made me self-conscious. I also hate how it feels; all this, shall we say, bodily material flapping on the bones, which I guess is the industry's reason for creating skin-tight apparel. My current walking / running garb consists of twenty-year-old-overwashed-tapered-leg-hand-me-down dress pants. Yeah.

What came to my running mind was a years-old photo of me when I ran track in school. I resisted digging it out of the Photo Vat of Every Life Stage, but with a half-hearted amount of rifling, I found it in minutes.

Okay.

This picture is evidence that it was never about running. It was about intention, with a clear and simple purpose -- NOW. Entwined in that was the effortlessness that comes with finding a rhythm. No labored breathing (mouth closed here as I head to the finish line ahead of the pack!), no pounding, no pain. I forgot. It is the same feeling when I am immersed in my art or music, when I create.

THAT is the goal. I waste too much time worrying about doing it right.

And movement has always pulled out my most creative thoughts and ideas.

So, now my already daily four-mile walk is punctuated with sprints. That jogging stuff -- forget it. I know the rhythm when I reach it -- everything loosens, there is no ache, no real bodily awareness, no thought of form. There is NO FORM, just flight. If I startle the herons on the river maybe we end up flying together.